The Architecture of Manipulation: Dark Patterns, Game Theory, and the Theft of Cooperation

The Architecture of Manipulation: Dark Patterns, Game Theory, and the Theft of Cooperation

What if resistance were stripped out, friction removed, and the surface made so smooth that you could no longer perceive the forces shaping your behavior? Part 2 of “Resistance as Material” traces the architecture of digital manipulation — from dark patterns and surveillance capitalism through algorithmic racism to the mathematical proof that cooperation outperforms extraction. Always.

The Inner Force of Things: Material Agency from Craft to Code

The Inner Force of Things: Material Agency from Craft to Code

Digital infrastructures are not neutral tools. They are materials with their own agency, their own resistances, their own agenda. This essay traces material agency in digital art from Benjamin’s aura through Barad’s agential realism, Haraway’s situated knowledges, and Yuk Hui’s cosmotechnics — asking what it means to make political art when your material is code, your canvas is infrastructure, and your medium resists.